


Dead Man's Drop

by orphan_account



Category: BioShock, BioShock Infinite
Genre: Gen, POV Minor Character, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-25
Updated: 2013-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-06 02:36:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1101366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Fiction On Christmas Morning giveaway on my Tumblr, for the anon who wanted "<i>Bioshock Infinite, death was never an enemy of ours</i>".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Man's Drop

**Author's Note:**

> Preston E. Downs is an in-game character, although you only learn his story through Voxophones. [Here](http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Preston_E._Downs) is a little bit about him. There's a theory that his is the voice we hear on the Vox-controlled radio station as Booker and Elizabeth enter Emporia. I'd also like to note that this piece is from _his_ POV; his thoughts on Daisy and the Vox are not in any way, shape, or form representative of my own. If this reads a lot like a privileged white dude appropriating a struggle that he has no business to in order to assuage his own guilt, well, that's because it was supposed to.

By the time Preston makes it to Fink’s office, the man is already dead.

It had been Hell making it this far. The Vox had taken the city and they were doing their best to raze it down to the foundations. The manufacturing district had been transformed into something out of the pits of Tartarus. Drunk on victory, the Vox were looting stores indiscriminately. Anything that couldn’t be stolen was set on fire or smashed to smithereens. Roving gangs went from building to building, gutting them like the fat, easy carcasses that they were.

Anyone who wasn’t wearing the Vox uniform was dragged out into the street. Preston heard some of them begging for mercy. As far as he knew, none of them got any.

The Vox hadn’t got as far as this by being kind.

Preston couldn’t say he blamed them. It had taken a lot of force to keep these people down, after all. Take that pressure away and it stood to reason that they would spring up like Jack-in-the-boxes.

With the child in tow, their progress was slowed to a near crawl. Preston kept them out of sight as much as possible and dropped anyone who came too near. They skirted around the worst of the destruction where they could, braved the heat where they couldn’t. When the smoke got too thick, Preston scavenged a couple of Vox corpses for something to tie around their faces. He secured the child’s for him, but despite his best efforts to adjust the size the red fabric still seemed to swallow him up. Preston had fiddled with it for longer that he should have, until an earth-trembling _boom_ made him abandon it and move on.

The child looked sweaty and drawn. When they stopped, Preston could see the way his thin arms trembled, his hands shaking around the grips of his crutches. He watched the carnage around him without apparent emotion. They passed piles of well-dress bodies; Preston glanced back, uneasy, but the child simply looked at the corpses with flat, incurious eyes.

He remembered the child’s words, delivered in Booker DeWitt’s gruff monotone. _People spit at me in the streets. I take small jobs, hoping for some money, but then they say that I don’t work hard enough, so they beat me and don’t pay me. Some nights, I am so hungry that I eat rats. I fall asleep next to the other children, and I hope they don’t die during the night because they are the only thing keeping me warm._

The Vox have spilled into the Factory like a wave, obliterating everything in their path. There’s shattered glass everywhere, and Preston has never been more glad that he found the kid a shoe to wear on his one remaining foot. He winces when he sees the bodies of the Founder troops, strung up like bunting between two headless statues of Fink, but the child seems unmoved. He remains so even when a group of Vox surprises them, no doubt drawn by the sound of their footsteps and the tapping of the child’s crutches, and Preston shoots them all dead.

Preston keeps expecting the child to protest the slaughter, to stand up for his fellow Vox. He can’t understand why he doesn’t. In moments like that, the language gap between them feels more like a canyon. He wishes he’d thought to ask Booker to translate the question for him.

Now Booker is dead, and Preston has long since given up hope of finding someone else who can speak Sioux. In a city like Columbia, one was a miracle. Two is impossible.

The child is silent, so silent. He follows Preston doggedly through the carcass of the Factory and he doesn’t make a sound, even though his face is drawn with exhaustion. They pass by ruined clocks, machines with half their gears missing, still ticking away. The Factory is full of statues of Fink, and the Vox have beheaded them all. Some of them have painted Vox slogans on the walls, and Preston can no longer tell what’s blood and what’s greasepaint. Others have abandoned their masks, and the doll-like devil’s heads bear lonely vigil to Preston and the child’s progress.

They pass through a room where the windows have been smashed all the way up to the ceiling with deliberate precision. The air is thick with smoke and the smell of ruin.

On the upper levels, there’s evidence of a fight. Preston holds his breath as they creep past the body of a Vox handyman, each of its porcelain hands as big as a full-grown man. At this, the child finally looks curious: he keeps pace as they pass, but Preston sees him peering at the handyman’s scarred face, the flabby-looking heart in its sealed glass tank. His eyes are as bright as a bird’s. It’s the most alive that Preston has seen him look since the Hall of Heroes, when Booker gave voice to his anger. The realization makes him uncomfortable.

It doesn’t take very long for them to find Fink’s body. Preston knew exactly where the other man would be: in his office, safe from the tide of fire and fury that rose below.

He was right on the first count, at least.

He had expected to find Daisy Fitzroy there.

He hadn’t expected her to be dead too.

The child makes a noise when he sees her, a terrible, high-pitched whining sound. It’s the kind of noise that transcends every language barrier. Pain, Preston thinks. Pain is a universal language. The child makes his way over to the body and then hesitates, like he wants to kneel down beside it but can’t quite figure out how to make his ruined body work. The look on his face is no longer blank. He looks wrecked. He looks like he did when he woke up after the amputation, took one look at Preston’s white, bloodstained face, and _broke_. Preston can still remember the sound the child had made, that keening. Can remember the torment in his eyes.

Fink died from a single bullet-wound to the head, quick and clean.

Preston doesn’t know what Fitzroy died from, but it wasn’t quick, and it doesn’t look clean.

Preston has seen a lot of blood in his time, has even caused his fair share of it. He already knows that nothing could be worse than the sight of his hands, shaking as they cradle a child’s severed leg. But looking at the puddle of blood around Fitzroy’s body, the tracks where someone has walked through it, he can’t help but feel sick.

The way the child’s looking at her body makes him feel even sicker.

The first thing the child had done when he’d woken up after the amputation was scream. The second thing he’d done was to throw the blankets off him, despite Preston’s attempts to keep them where they were, and howl at the empty space where his leg had been. He had clawed at the bandaged stump until Preston had forced his hands away. The look on his face had been one of loss. There had been grief, as well, and pain, but mostly it had been loss.

That’s the way the child is looking at Fitzroy’s body now. Loss. For a woman he never even _knew_ \--

\-- but Preston supposes he _did_ know her. He had known her through posters, through radio announcements, through kinetoscopes, through the words of the people around him. Preston had heard them talk about Fitzroy in Shantytown. They may never have met in person, but for this child and other children like him, Fitzroy was someone they _knew_.

Once upon a time, it was Preston’s job to kill this woman. He had hunted her down as one might hunt an elusive animal, had stalked through the streets of Shantytown as if it were long brush.

Now, the thought that it could have been him who killed her makes him shudder.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Child. I’m sorry.”

The child says nothing. As far as Preston knows, he didn’t even hear him. He wonders if he should be pulling the child away - surely it’s not good for him to see this - but when he reaches out to touch his arm, the child pulls away with a sound of negation. Preston frowns and reaches out again, but this time the child raises his crutches as if to hit him. He glares at Preston and says something in his native tongue. It doesn’t sound friendly.

Preston backs off, hands raised. “I’m _sorry_ ,” he repeats, but it sounds petulant now.

The child returns to his vigil of Fitzroy’s body, and Preston looks out of the window. He’s angry now, and burning with it. He feels ashamed, but he’s not sure why he feels ashamed, and that only makes him angrier. He stares at the far-off buildings, with their teeth of fire and pillars of smoke. Columbia is burning, the flames rising from Shantytown to lick at Battleship Bay.

The Vox will destroy the city, this Preston knows. But that isn’t the end of it. They’ll burn it down to the base, and then what? Will they rebuild? Will they try to abandon it? _Can_ they abandon it? The sky is suspiciously clear of zeppelins, most of Columbia’s wealthy elite having fled the city as soon as they got the chance. There’ll be some who didn’t make it out, but the Vox will soon eject them, like grit from an open wound.

Then what? Preston studied Fitzroy for weeks, but even he can’t fathom the goals of a dead woman. Did she envision a future for Columbia, after the fires receded and the coldness of reality began to set in? Or did her dedication to the cause begin and end with vengeance? Was she interested in building a new world, or just in tearing the old one down?

Preston glances at the child again, still grieving over Fitzroy’s corpse. Hunch-shouldered, head down, he looks like an animal that’s been kicked before, and is expecting to be kicked again.

_They told me that I would be better off dead, like the rest of my people. And I believed them!_

Another memory. A child’s anger and grief, spoken in the voice of a man.

Now, the only voice on the radio is that of the terrified announcer, begging for his life.

“It’s not over,” Preston says, and even as he says it it he realizes the truth of it. “Child. _Child_. It’s _not over_. I said that I would get you to Comstock, and I meant it. Until then, it’s not over.”

The child looks up at Preston, and the hatred in his gaze _burns_.

“Come on,” Preston says. “We’ve got work to do.”

 

* * *

 

Later, after they find the radio station with its dead announcer.

Later, after Preston eases the mouthpiece from his hands and puts voice to the simmering fury in the child’s eyes. _The district’s ours. Execute anyone who looks like they might give you trouble. Anyone with a gun, anyone wearing glasses. Round up the rest._

Later, after they’ve made their way through streets thick with smoke and the scent of blood. The Vox they’ve pass nodding at them, at the slashes of red fabric tied around their throats. The piles of burning bodies, burning luggage, burning plants. Burning masonry. The houses with their empty, gutted faces, belching smoke. The storefronts with their smashed windows and tattered displays. The children grubbing for coins in the street.

Later, after the fighting is mostly over, and the spoils of war have been either devoured or destroyed.

Preston has never suffered with tremors. His hands are perfectly steady on the trigger of his gun. When they sit on the steps outside a ruined bookstore, he is still and quiet. The child perches next to him, his crutches put neatly to one side. They sit and watch the city burn in silence.

“I’m sorry,” Preston says, and it suddenly feels like he’s continuing a conversation he started hours ago, in Fink’s office. He doesn’t look at the child as he says it. Can’t look at him. “For what I did to you. For what Daisy did to you. For what this whole damn city has done to you. And I’m going to try to make it right, if I can. When we find Comstock, I’ll let you hold the knife.”

He glances over at the child, and is surprised to find the child watching him back. Even more surprised when the child speaks. Apart from the incident with Booker, the child has been silent around Preston. Perhaps he was quiet to begin with; Preston noticed that the children in Shantytown often were. Perhaps he simply had no desire to speak, knowing that Preston would never understand him.

He doesn’t seem bothered by that now. The words coming out of the child’s mouth are foreign, but the look in his eyes is not. Hatred and determination. The revolution is burning out around them, but the fire in the child’s eyes is still going strong.

Preston picks up a sound, repeated many times. _Kte_.

He doesn’t know what it means.

He nods anyway.

 

* * *

 

By the time Preston makes it to Comstock house, the man is already dead.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Ham-fisted Googling tells me that _kte_ is a Siouan word for _kill_ ([sources](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sioux+word+Kte&oq=sioux+word+Kte&aqs=chrome..69i57.3288j0j8&bmbp=1&sourceid=chrome&espvd=215&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#es_sm=93&q=sioux+word+Kte+kill)). I'll leave you to imagine what the child might have been saying.


End file.
